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Friday, August 08, 2014

Fund Raising to Self Publish

I can't tell you how much we ( my daughter Celeste, the designer of the book and I) appreciate the support and positive comments on the Pozible site we have received so far. To know we have this much support already shows there is interest in the book we are proposing. However we still have some way to go. I know I pitched the idea to a publisher back in 2011 and even wrote a sample chapter but it was decided there would not be enough interest and that it was too difficult, and that I was not well known enough in the American market place. Well really that is like waving a red flag in some ways. My number one priority in the last few years was to get daughter youngest off to university, so some of the things on my priority list had to go to the back burner for awhile, but this year I have promised myself to do better, to really meet all the challenges and to fill the year as full as I could.

It hasn't helped that I have had quite a few workshop cancellations here in Australia, in fact I haven't taught in Australia since November last year which makes me quite sad really, and well it is a burden on the budget as well. I know people are interested in what I teach from the number of emails I get and I know there are lots of people wishing to step beyond patchwork and quilting, but still work with textile and thread and ideas, which is where my teaching comes in. I also know that there are great supporters here in Australia through your support with Pozible ( and also the sentinelle project), which gladdens my heart because with workshop cancellations you do sometimes wonder.

So onward and upward is the only way, and to keep doing the work and to make sure I meet all those challenges . So some recent work I have been doing playing with the fictionalised olive tree image, the orange tree still needs to be hand stitched. This tree will be part of the chapter dealing with Trees and Grapevines in our book Musing in Textile: France.

The Pozible fund raiser really works like a kind of pre-ordering system in our case, as our rewards are tailored around that idea ; you will get a book , and more ,if you pledge a higher reward with some enticing extras thrown in. For example the master class which is the highest reward is not only a master class but also a kind of mentoring which I thought would continue even after the 4 days of the actual class. And likewise the other workshop rewards mean not only will you be able to do a workshop but you will also get a signed copy of the book, and the reward amount has been worked out at a workshop cost of around $60 per person- so you could get together with 7 of your friends and you would not be out of pocket more than attending any other workshop ( indeed when I look at print making workshops or other art workshops the going rate is much higher than $60 per person per day )

One of the wonderful things of this project has been working with my daughter, Celeste who is a final year Visual Communications and Design student at RMIT, Melbourne. I know I had ideas about how I wanted the book to look, but she also has ideas ,so that the book has become a true collaboration.She also pushes me along as we have timelines and deadlines to meet. This week the collaboration has suffered a bit as she has struggled with a really bad cold, last week it struggled because I had to get all the words down in their final form and plan the videos which will be on the dvd that will accompany the book. In working together we have also decided we would like to do more of this kind of writing and visual stimulating but perhaps in an even more truly collaborative way.

We have really nutted this idea out in over a year of planning. We sifted through books we both liked ( and not necessarily textile) and pulled from those books things we liked and did not like, we have had great discussions and study of the actual design and layout, even to the minuteae of how the type will be set and the hand kerning ( the kind of type, we both had ideas about this but it is my daughters' passion) and the width of margins( we really did get the ruler out, when we found a book that we both found visually pleasing to read and work through) We have also made a conscious decision that we want the "how to" section of the book to be on dvd as a sort of resource which you can dip into separately. I find how to pages in books to be distracting and because of what they try and show ,often have boring and uninteresting photos. We have also realised there are many ways of learning hence the video section of the dvd.

We really hope you will support our project!

Don't forget there is a great exhibition of quilts ( and some of my work) on at the Media Art Gallery in the Age Building in Melbourne, opposite Southern Cross Station and I shall be doing a floor talk there on 19 August. The opening was last Wednesday and the work looked fabulous. You can find details and the stories of the work on the Yarns, Stuff and Stitching Blog

Musing in Textile:France Pozible campaign

About Me

I am a Textile Artist and itinerant at the moment.My base at present is in Geelong though I teach around the world.I love to dye and print fabrics and assemble them into quilts with lots of stitching both by hand and machine.I also create my own linocuts for printing on fabric.

Lovely Lutradur

Lovely Lutradur- Shipping Costs

We have priced the Lovely Lutradur Cd to include packaging and posting- so the prices are:Australia $25 inclusive of postageUnited Kingdon 12 GBP- inclusive of postageEurope 15 Euros inclusive of postageUSA $24 inclusive of postage